“To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”

Gifts by Ursula Le Guin
Orlando, Fla. : Harcourt, c2004.

Gifts, the first of the Annals of the Western Shore fantasy trilogy, follows the story of Young Orrec and his friend, Gry. They are Uplanders, differentiated from the Lowlanders by their supernatural gifts. Gry, whose power is to speak to beasts, refuses to use her gift to call them to the hunt. Orrec’s gift is terrible, the power to ‘unmake’. After he is shown the extent of this ‘gift’ from his father, he agrees to be blindfolded, as he can’t control it. It's a powerful question, what to do with the gifts we have, and Le Guin’s story is masterful and utterly haunting.